When President Barack Obama signs the Every Student Succeeds Act into law as early as this week, it will trigger a significant transfer of power over education policy away from the federal government to states and school districts.
The new measure will replace No Child Left Behind, the widely criticized education law that in 2002 gave the federal government a sweeping role with the goal of holding states accountable for their most disadvantaged students and worst performing schools.
But the overhaul has some in the education community, including civil rights advocates who lent tepid support to the effort, worried that the new, hands-off approach by the feds will allow states to shirk the responsibility of ensuring equal education for underprivileged students.
“The hard-learned lesson of the civil rights community over decades has shown that a strong federal role is crucial to protecting the interests of underserved students,” The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, a coalition of advocacy groups, wrote to members of Congress. “Now, more than ever, access to a quality education makes the difference between economic self-sufficiency and the grip of poverty.”
In crafting the new legislation, lawmakers from both chambers threaded the smallest of needles to settle on a new accountability system that satiated the Republican demands for a limited federal role and the Democrats’ insistence that civil rights and equal access to education remain at the heart of the law.
The compromise came after months of jockeying and closed-door negotiations.
Requirements that states identify and intervene in troubled schools were added to the House and Senate versions of the bill after Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., threatened to filibuster it and Education Secretary Arne Duncan said their inclusion was imperative for the president’s signature.
Meanwhile, the education secretary’s power over states, which critics say Duncan has wielded liberally to push his agenda, was rolled back significantly.
“I’m proud of the progress we made in the final bill to make sure schools work to close achievement gaps and help more students earn their diploma. And, for schools that are struggling, our bill will help make sure they get the support they need to improve,” said Sen. Patty Murray, a Washington Democrat and one of the principal architects of the Every Student Succeeds Act, who fought for the additional accountability.
But not everyone is optimistic the bill strikes the right balance.
“Federal pressure is a hard thing for people to swallow, but this law doesn’t give enough federal pressure for enough schools and doesn’t define the guardrails we need,” says Conor Williams, senior researcher in the education policy program at New America, a Washington think tank.
The Every Student Succeeds Act eliminates No Child Left Behind’s punitive approach to accountability and allows states to craft their own systems. Under the new law, states will be able to set their own academic standards and create teacher evaluations as they see fit.
They’ll also need to identify and intervene in the bottom 5 percent of their worst performing schools, so-called dropout factories – or schools where more than two-thirds of students aren’t graduating – and schools that are failing to close achievement gaps between demographic subgroups. How they’ll do so will be up to the states.
The new law doesn’t prescribe fixes or give the federal government authority to step in, except in extenuating circumstances.
Some provisions of No Child Left behind are staying put.
The federal testing schedule will continue to require states to test students annually in grades three through eight in reading and math, and once in high school.
The new law will maintain the requirement that schools annually report student achievement scores and disaggregate that data by subgroups like race, economic status, disability and English-learner status. The data collected by No Child Left Behind was the only universally touted aspect of the law, which succeeded in shining a spotlight on achievement gaps.
The law will also preserve the requirement that a school district test no less than 95 percent of its students, but it gives states leeway in deciding how to handle schools and districts where large numbers of students opt out of annual testing. In the past year, thousands of students have opted out of state assessments in protest of more rigorous testing, causing a growing number of states to struggle with how to carry out their obligations.
Striking the Right Balance
Fifty years ago, President Lyndon Johnson sat alongside his first elementary school teacher in rural Texas and signed into law the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the federal K-12 law that we know today as No Child Left Behind.
“As a son of a tenant farmer, I know that education is the only valid passport from poverty,” Johnson said that day. “By passing this bill, we bridge the gap between helplessness and hope for more than 5 million educationally deprived children.”
Like other civil rights era laws, the 1965 measure sought to right decades of injustices largely rooted in unequal access to resources. Johnson directed federal dollars to even the playing field between rich and poor children, white and black students, children with every advantage in the world and those with disabilities.
But by 2002, only 29 states had adopted some type of consequential accountability system, according to Bellwether Education Partners, an education consulting firm in Washington. Fourteen states relied solely on achievement score reporting, and the remaining seven states did nothing.
States generally weren’t concerned with the performance of student subgroups either, according to a report by the Government Accountability Office. When the report was released in 2000, only 17 states disaggregated data by gender, racial and ethnic group, income, migrant status, disability and English proficiency.
No Child Left Behind required data collection and standardized testing, but critics point to the law’s unintended consequences. For one, its punitive accountability system, which penalized states if not enough students were hitting proficiency targets in reading and math, is largely blamed for creating a culture of overtesting.
The law also required an increasing number of students to hit those targets every year, which led some states to lower their academic standards. More than 90 percent of students in Tennessee scored proficient in math and reading, but less than 30 percent were proficient based on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a national test given to students in every state and known as the Nation’s Report Card.
“When we did No Child Left Behind, we didn’t know any better,” says Sandy Kress, who served as senior adviser to President George W. Bush and was key architect of the No Child Left Behind law. “We didn’t even know how to measure growth, but now we do, and it could be way more sophisticated, and give states much more flexibility but hold them accountable for meeting goals.”
The bipartisan bill headed to the White House is the latest iteration of Johnson’s vision.
“Fifty years ago, Congress originally passed [Elementary and Secondary Education Act] to help make that right a reality, and the Every Student Succeeds Act honors the civil rights legacy of that law,” said Rep. Bobby Scott, the Virginia Democrat and ranking member of the House education committee, on the chamber floor last week.
Some see a new era in education, with a greater role for the new state advocacy organizations, like Washington-based nonprofit 50CAN. Such organizations, which have sprouted across the country over the past few years, could act as accountability watchdogs at the local level, says Chad Aldeman, associate partner at Bellwether Education Partners, an education consulting firm in Washington.
“They will fight for stronger accountability,” he says. “But I don’t know if they’ll win, and that’s what worries me.”
Even if states are successful in electing or appointing education chiefs who have ambitious plans for closing achievement gaps and turning around failing schools, the political environment at the state level presents a challenge all its own, says Aldeman.
“While I appreciate what individuals are saying, I don’t expect the system will let them stay and execute all of their plans,” Aldeman says. “There is such churn at the states level in the people and plans that it’s hard to believe any promises people make.”
Kress, for his part, believes that four or five years from now the pendulum will swing back toward a meatier role for the federal government.
“I think there will be a recognition a few years out that this was a mistake,” he says. “It may have felt good, it may have been a natural response to an unfulfilled No Child Left Behind and a response to [the Obama administration’s use of executive authority]. But I think people will say we should have stayed the course instead of throwing our hands up.”
